Author: Libby Chidlow

To some Ohio University students, the heart of Athens, Ohio, is Court Street. This brick road is located in Uptown Athens and is home to businesses that range from college bookstores to boutiques and pubs. In the video below, Heather Willard and Olivia Miltner, who are both graduating seniors studying journalism, mulled over what Court Street meant to them and to the city.

Everyone knows the importance of breakfast: it reduces obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease and diabetes. But if you’re anything like me, then you’re more concerned about making your stomach happy than whether it’s being fed the right serving size.

Sometimes you wake up, put on that pot of dark-roast coffee or green tea, and know exactly how to satisfy your taste buds. Odds are, though, that only happens once or twice per week.

I’m always craving something new to shake up my routine, and when I do, I check out the sites curated below. My search ranges from professional Bobby Flay to Instagram foodies.

For food porn or an extravagant Sunday-morning brunch recipe, grill master Bobby Flay is the man for you. His website is a collection of different brunch concoctions from Bourbon Apple Hot Toddy to Biscuit French Toast with Cinnamon-Orange Cane Syrup. His slideshow of 53 different recipes will have you drooling and running to the nearest grocery store.

You might want to sit down for this . . . imagine if all of Pinterest was solely dedicated to posts about brunch. That’s breakfast.food.com for you. This site is the curator of all curators. Click “find a recipe” and search for any ingredient you have or crave. Based on popularity and the star-rating system, the site will give you a filtered list of only the breakfast food with the word(s) you searched. After clicking on a recipe, you can either save it in your recipe box or save the ingredients in a grocery list for your next trip to Kroger. Be careful, though, without restraint you’ll be scrolling for hours!

Not only does Buzzfeed tell you how to make a recipe, it shows you, too. By going to Buzzfeed’s news section, you’re able to scroll through every post it ever made about breakfast. You can learn how to make a one-pan sweet potato breakfast hash or what waffle topping goes with your astrological sign.

Tastemade is the Buzzfeed of the foodie community. The site has over 300 breakfast recipes ready for the making and videos to show you just how it’s done. Tastemade is very active on Facebook, gathering over 330,000 views per video. It also has an app so you can easily glance at your screen while you cook, just try not to unlock your screen with your sticky Cinnamon bun-covered fingers.

Source: Tastemade, Cinnamon Bun Doughnuts

Breakfast Criminals

Ksenia, who runs the Breakfast Criminals Instagram account, will inspire you to eat healthy, think positively and travel with her unique recipes. She specializes in the millennial-favorite smoothie bowl and anything superfood. Ksenia can also be found all over social media. If videos and blog posts aren’t enough for you, check out her new health-conscious e-book, “Breakfast Criminals: The Life-Changing Power of Superfood Breakfasts.”

After waking up and losing interest in my repetitive breakfast habits, I started to look at different recipes online. “Start your morning right” is a newsletter meant to break the traditional breakfast routine. Whether you want to venture into the professional world of Bobby Flay or the social media world of Instagram foodies is at your discretion. The only thing that matters is whether your stomach is full and satisfied.

Winter is coming for President Donald Trump. As he signs executive orders and makes presidential memoranda, snowflakes gather closer and closer together, becoming colder and bigger by the second. Below is a compiled list of all the snowflakes refusing to melt.

Affordable Care Act (ACA)

Hours after President Trump took office, this snowflake broke out in shingles. Why? The new president began the process of reforming and, eventually, repealing “Obamacare.” The order, small as it may seem, allows the new secretary of health and human services and other federal agencies to “interpret regulations as loosely as possible to minimize the financial ‘burden’ on individuals, insurers, health care providers and others.” The president is urging his policy makers, and stressing out this snowflake, to work relentlessly to draft a piece of legislation to oppose “Obamacare” so that he can repeal the ACA as soon as possible.

Source: Flickr

2. Global Gag Rule

The pattern of undoing and redoing the “Mexico City” abortion policy began with President Ronald Reagan and continued with the 45th president. The policy bans federal funds from being used to support organizations that provide counseling to women on family planning when abortion is a medical option or even just mentioned in consults. After reading this on Twitter, the snowflake below rose up in an uproar, whipped off its purple blanket, and began calling all its elected officials. Wishing it could do more, the snowflake donated to the International Planned Parenthood Federation.

Source: Flickr

3. Dakota Access and Keystone XL Pipelines.

When Trump informed the public that he plans to personally renegotiate the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Keystone XL pipelines, this snowflake, an environmental activist, was livid. It had just spent months with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and had fought against the Keystone XL pipeline in 2015 . . . now the president wants to test this snowflake and its people again? Over its puddle body.

Source: Flickr

4. The Wall

This bristling snowflake below commented an angry face on its friend’s Facebook post about President Trump’s plan to actually construct a 1,900-mile long wall along the border with Mexico. It immediately went and retweeted former President of Mexico Vicente Fox’s tweets against the border wall; all the while questioning why the Trump administration is working relentlessly to find money for a wall but cannot find a proper education secretary.

Source: Flickr

5. The Muslim Ban

President Donald Trump carelessly ordered an indefinite ban on Syrian refugees, a 120-day ban on all other refugees and a 90-day ban on visitors from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. Snowflakes from all over quickly swarmed together and blew into airports. A few snowflakes representing the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) even sued, resulting in a New York federal court issuing an “emergency stay on President Trump’s executive order banning immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries.” This, however, was not enough for some law enforcement as people were still being detained. Hundreds of snowflakes flew to the rescue, defending those being detained pro bono and protesting within the airports for hours on end.

Sally Yates, a proud snowflake and U.S. attorney general, refused to defend the executive order and joined the blizzard rushing toward the White House instead; eminently resulting in the termination of her position.

If the three million snowflakes who wore pussy hats and marched across the world and the yet-to-be determined number of protesters and attorneys filling airports at this very moment are any idea of what’s to come … well, President Trump better find a way to stay warm.

Walking through Athens, Ohio, a tour guide will point out the grandeur of Schoonover Center or the intricate design of Baker University Center; but to some, it’s the Vernon R.Alden Library that catches their eye and distracts them from the rest of College Green.

The library towers over Baker Center and College Green; its long, rectangular eyes watching over the thousands upon thousands of students who come and go from its contemporary structure. Many fear the responsibility that comes with entering the library, it’s where people go to be stressed not become stress-free.

For me, on the contrary, it’s just where I want to be while at college; well, maybe not so much on the weekends but you get my point. The windows, reflecting the blue sky or making patterns of rain on a wet day, are welcoming. As I walk toward the fourth floor entrance with its revolving doors, “The American Woman” – the statue in Wolfe Garden, – is always there to greet me.

“The American Woman” stands prominently outside the back entrance of Alden Library.

In the spring, fresh flowers surround the bronze statue, but for me, when white snow falls around the statue, and her figure is a stark blue against the white snow, that is when the art and the library are the most beautiful.

Although I enter on the fourth or second floor, it’s the seventh level that is my favorite place in Athens, Ohio. Rows and rows of books, red, blue, green, are all parallel to one another in bookcases that fill the entire square footage of the floor. Desks are situated next to the windows, where the studious become the watchers. At times, the ability to see out and watch the busy lives below can be distracting but the connection to the outside is also calming.

I hear people comment about the smell of the seventh floor, expressing distaste in the poignant musk of the old books. It’s a smell I appreciate, who knows when those old books will be replaced by cold, thin technology that doesn’t crack when you open it or flutter as you flip through it. I’m being dramatic, I know, but when it comes to the seventh floor of Alden I can’t help but be swept up in it.

No library can ever be complete without books.

But just what makes the seventh floor better than all the others? It’s not just the books or the view, but the silence that comes with being at the very top of the library. The floor enforces the no-talking rule; the only sounds heard tend to be the shuffling of feet, the faint beat of someone’s study music or the ding of the elevator. I do my best to chew gum as quietly as possible or take my bagel out of a crinkly paper bag by moving as slowly as possible.

People respect your study space, they respect your need to work diligently without being interrupted by loud conversations about weekend antics or who won Sunday’s playoff game (sadly, not the Steelers).

Alden Library is where I go to better myself, its seventh floor gives me a serene place to relax and focus on my workload. It’s a sanctuary for those who want to get away from the world but still be able to look out and see the busy lives below. For these reasons and more, Alden Library is my favorite place in Athens, Ohio.